Sargeant Major de Brito’s Great Feminist Battle Plan

I’m feeling a little like Danny Glover in the lethal weapon series. I made the mistake of reading this Sam de Brito pearl of wisdom, and all I can really say is ‘I’m too old for this shit’.

I actually don’t want to write about the two Sams any more as they’re just so infinitely repetitive and make the same sorts of idiotic arguments over and over. So while I think acting as a guerilla style Media Watch on them is worthwhile, it also means I’m boring myself to tears in making the same sorts of counterarguments. Nevertheless, I did read it…

Read. Marvel as Sam declares all fathers feminists (NOT in my experience) by virtue of their having a daughter. Be astounded as he condemns all women as being interested in things trivial rather than the well being of their daughters.

If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care – the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.

If female opinion makers and power brokers did not work for male media owners and male run political parties and could talk feminism without ridicule and censure we might find them more willing to do it. But let’s not kid ourselves. When women *do* talk feminism there is no groundswell of media and community pressure, there is ridicule and condemnation peppered with a good few ‘ugly lezzo’ references.

Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman’s magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government’s agenda where it rightly should be …

Seriously, women’s magazines are businesses like any other (0ften ultimately under the control of male owned and run media congolmerates) and they rely on ADVERTISING for their profits. So you find a way for capitalism to profit from feminism and feminist issues, and then we might see support from media owners, trickling down through advertising and into women’s mags. Pull your head in you fucking goose.

And even if they were NOT businesses run for profit and so dependant on all that shit, by your logic the political agenda being controlled by what’s in the women’s mags, how to wear lurid blue, where to obtain the best labioplasty and the debates of To Have a Fringe Or Not to Have A Fringe should have decided the last election. Idiot.

As with all social upheavals, it’s not going to happen by saying ‘Excuse me, Sir’ or ‘Would you mind if we discussed this topic?’ it has to be slammed into the faces of the people who matter, and by default, the masses who need to be told what to think will stir and drag their heads out of the “what people are wearing section”.

May I just say then, as one of the women who has slammed it in *your* face before and been rubbished with extreme contempt and been censured (you withheld my comments until I complained often enough that they miraculously appeared) you might want to quit the fucking lecturing til you’ve put your money where your mouth is.

Women learn very quickly the sort of censure waiting for them if they dare to be unhappy with women’s lot in life. My own father loves to refer to ‘fucking idiot feminists’, and women are quick to learn that praise is lavished on those women who can perform femininity acceptably well while disavowing politics, feminism and anything that might ‘ruin’ them by causing unsightly frown lines. Do NOT tell me men do not participate in that socialisation.

Tell me that the editors of every woman’s magazine in this country (almost exclusively female, most of whom know each other or someone they work with) couldn’t co-ordinate a united front on this issue?

But no, let’s talk endlessly about cellulite and handbags and who Lindsay Lohan is shagging instead and pretend that’s going to re-shape the world we live in and the one our daughters and sons will inherit.

I don’t think that celebrity mags pretend they’re going to re-shape the world at all, and nor do you.

Speaking of groups of people in the same field of employ who all know one another, can the same not be said of politicians? Male opinion columnists? Men’s mag writers? Oh, I see debating which chick has the best tits and which ways you’d like to fuck them in mens mags (which frequently discuss how very revolting cellulite is and which feature ‘hot chicks’ in hot shoes) is FAR more serious sport and more likely to re-shape the world our daughters and sons will inherit for the better than shoes and cellulite.

It’s time that Australian women stop bemoaning the attitudes of Australian men and take responsibility for the views of their girlfriends, mothers and most of all their daughters.

Excuse me? Did you just tell me that by virtue of owning a similar set of genitals I should *take responsibility* for the views of my female friends and family?

Well I *do* argue with them, however where they’re vehemently anti-feminism they know what society likes and what society punishes, and what society *likes* is a nice woman, a happy woman, a compliant woman, a young and sexy woman, and if they shut their mouths and never complain along feminist lines they know that’s a wee bit safer than starting arguments they can’t win by virtue of the fact that it’s decreed that a penis trumps a vagina and therefore that the penis owner is always right.

But what are these concerned feminist fathers doing for their daughters? Are the fathers not concerned about the stats of male inflicted violence against women? If women are to take responsibility for women, then where are the men taking responsibility for men?

We now live in a country where a generation of Australian women don’t even consider themselves feminists, having rejected the term because they think they’ll be labelled a lesbian and won’t get a boyfriend if they use the word.

Yeah, those are new concerns aren’t they? Women *think* those things for very good reasons, namely that experience has taught them it is so.

And…was it not YOU who groaned ‘Please let me never sit next to you at dinner’ when I pulled you up on your problematic wankery? You who suggested (in a feminist way I’m sure) that you could never date a fat chick? Don’t fucking get up in women’s faces after that shit. If men are so much more feminists, because it’s real and sensible and important then use your fucking column to advance it and NOT by lumping the blame for it on women. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO WANTS THEM WEARING THE RIGHT SHOES AND THE RIGHT CLOTHES AND LOOKING LIKE THEY’RE STRAIGHT FROM A MENS MAG/FASHION MAG!

Fearful, insecure men and the politicised lesbian activists who hijacked the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s can take equal responsibility for this perception problem but to correct it, modern women need look no further than their own backyards.

Wait, first women are to blame for being too apolitical, too consumed by insignificant trivialities, too timid for fear of being labelled lesbians and should shout it in people’s faces, THEN they’re to blame because they were indeed lesbians, and focussed on demanding change and were too political and got in people’s faces? Well?? Which is it?

Also, what do I open my backdoor and there’s every female I know waiting for me to begin my lecture? Look in your OWN backyard knob and I’ll take care of my own.

Oh hey, I don’t have one, cos I’m a single mum and I struggle to pay the rent on a tiny shoebox apartment on a main road! Perhaps I can wander downstairs to my share-laundry and sit on the coin operated washing machine in order to preach at any passing sisters? I’m sure they’ll LOVE THAT.

I could walk into any bar, supermarket or fashion boutique in this country and I guarantee I would know more about feminist issues than 90 per cent of the women in these establishments.

Sure if you consider it acceptable feminist practise to loathe women for doing exactly what is demanded of them and refusing feminism and THEN ALSO hating them if they walk away from the very shit you called time wasting and being political feminists.

Also, if you KNOW so fucking much, like how important it is, what exactly will you say to show you’ve DONE MORE FOR IT than them?

Ask a woman under 30 to even define what feminism is and I bet you’ll get a pea soup of misconceptions about hairy armpits, man-hating and rabid activism instead of this: feminism is the belief that women should have equal political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic rights to men.

Kinda like the pea soup of your average blog post where you decide you’re Mother Fucking Theresa, Saint of the Latter Day Feminists?

Who would not want this for their daughter?

Well then, where are the fucking Father’s for Feminism activists? Where are the dads (most media owners and advertising executives would be fathers or brothers or lovers right) using their MONEY and PRIVILEDGE to address this? They have the means more than women do, so why don’t they front up? If they all want this for their daughters and their wives are simply too frivolous to take charge, well WHAT is stopping them from doing it themselves? WHY do you consider childcare a women’s issue if dad’s care so much? Access to abortion when you’ve written about how badly men get done over by women getting knocked up to them?

The fact that that there is even resistance to this simple, self-evident truth illustrates how bad feminism’s image problem is with our youth – and if you can’t sell it to young women, how the hell are you going to get men to invest?

You are a truly terrible writer, did you know that? You just swung from dads wanting it for their kids and because it’s RIGHT to image problems with youth. This AFTER bemoaning an obsession with triviality. So are we then SUPPOSED to make feminism about shoes and botox in order to sex it up and attract the youth? Or come in swinging about how crap it all is and be censured for being too political? And surely the superior men able to resist the allure of triviality could make their own decisions and get off their arses without needing to be *sold* on feminism, if as you’ve argued it makes sense and is important to all fathers of daughters…

Body image and the depiction of gender in the media are important issues but they are not the main game; building a society where women have the exact-same opportunity to further themselves educationally and financially is the battlefront, because you then produce a female population articulate and unencumbered to make changes from the top down.

Thanks for your battle tips Sargeant Major Arseface. In fact I think you will find that the depiction of gender in media – the frequent depiction of violence against women, the total absence of *unattractive* women, the depiction of women as mere plot devices, as simply HOT or NOT, as less than full humans is intimately connected with views of women as less than fully human which impact society, and the deemed *importance* of “women’s issues”.

And if indeed you CAN see the battles that are important then what the fuck are you doing about them? Until such a time as you’re lobbying for these main games then shut the fuck up with your ‘all dad’s are feminists, all women are idiots, all feminists are responsible for all women everywhere, all feminists of the seventies were lesbians and that’s obviously a bad thing for feminism, feminists ought to sell themselves along the mainstream media lines of HOT HOT HOT even though they’re damned for triviality if they do crap.

So VERY sick of it.

[Hmm...all this time I've wondered what ETA meant at the bottom of posts, like estimated time of arrival? That made no sense...but - ta dah - I had an epiphetree, it's (of course) edited to add. So, ETA: BEPPIE RANTS TOO!!! Yay Beppie! Also, was kind of edited to add other stuff as I wrote the first version in fifteen minutes and came back with some 'Oh yeah! What about...?'s]